My Top 25 Movies of 2011

161 movies. That's roughly 320 hours spent sitting in a darkened theater, usually side-by-side with my film critic mates. That's a lot of time, a lot of popcorn, and frankly all the movies start to blend together after awhile. It's the nature of the job. That's not me complaining, mind you. Movies are what I love, even more than pro wrestling, hip hop, and Meat Lover's Pizza. Ok, maybe not that last one.

Even with a lot of these films starting to merge together in my mind, there are always so many great ones that it's hard to put together a list like this. I started out with something like 40 movies, and whittled it down over the course of the last couple of days. Some of these films are of the more mainstream variety, like Fast Five, some are hard hitting documentaries like Project NIM, and others take me back to my childhood like Super 8 and Winnie the Pooh.  As someone who started ranking his favorites way back when I was a child, I take these things pretty seriously. My opinions on all of these films have shifted and evolved over time, but this list represents my thoughts on them as of right this very moment. And so, without further ado, let's take a look at my Top 25 movies of 2011...
25. Super 8
24. Hanna
23. Project NIM
22. Winnie the Pooh
21. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
20. Warrior
19. Fast Five
18. The Mechanic
17. Shame
16. Hugo
15. The Ides of March
14. Source Code
13. Win Win
12. The Adventures of Tintin
11. Midnight in Paris
10. Melancholia
Lars von Trier took his personal experiences while in the midst of a devastating depression and channeled them into his most coherent, introspective film yet. While basically a soft science fiction film about a second planet threatening to destroy the earth in a matter of days, the film is really about how different types of people deal with adversity. Continuing her evolution into a serious dramatic actress, Kirsten Dunst is the woefully depressed newlywed, Justine, who greets the world's impending doom with unusual calm. Yet her sister, Claire(Charlotte Gainsbourg), always the one who had her life in perfect order, falls apart at the seams. A visual departure for the minimalist Von Trier, Melancholia invokes some truly grand artistic flourishes, with imagery that will forever be seared into my memory.
9. Bridesmaids
While the bulk of the attention has justifiably gone to Melissa McCarthy for her off-kilter performance as the raunchy and puppy obsessed Megan, Bridesmaids is truly Kristen Wiig's coming out party. The ever unappreciated SNL star has been on the verge of breaking out for years, and as the maid of honor, Annie Walker, she's a jumble of emotions ranging from pride, fear, jealousy, and depression. Directed with perfect comic timing by Paul Feig, Bridesmaids packs a great ensemble cast, gross out gags, and authentic characters you can relate to. The Hangover 2 didn't stand a chance against these ladies, Bridesmaids was far and away the funniest move of 2011.
8. Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol
Tom Cruise was out to quiet the critics with Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol. The people who thought he couldn't carry an action pic after the mediocre response to Knight and Day. Paramount brought in the "It" guy of the moment, Jeremy Renner, in what many saw as a passing the torch move. But if seeing the two of them on screen together told us anything, it's that this is very much Tom Cruise's show, and nobody is going to take it away for a long time. Directed by Pixar vet, Brad Bird, he takes his limitless imagination, molded for years as an animator, and creates some of the most jaw-dropping scenes you'll ever see. The tower sequence, in which Cruise scales the tallest building in the world, is a technical marvel. It's just one of many that show Bird to be a filmmaker with a long future ahead of him, and a shot of adrenaline to the Mission: Impossible franchise.
7. X-men: First Class 
After Brett Ratner and Gavin Hood ran the X-men franchise through a meat grinder with the previous two movies, Matthew Vaughn had no easy task ahead of him trying to revive it. He did it by sticking closer to the X-men's core concept than Bryan Singer ever did, and the best way to do that was to go back to the origins of the war between Professor Xavier(James McAvoy) and Magneto(Michael Fassbender), when their ideologies were at their most pure. I've been on record many times stating that X-men: First Class is better than Christopher Nolan's Batman films, and I continue to agree with myself on that. The primary reason besides the pitch perfect casting, is the way Vaughn used the 1960s time frame to his advantage when it could have been an anvil. By turning their mutant adventure into a globe trotting, James Bond-esque flick steeped in Cold War politics and racial animosity, Vaughn has added a layer to superhero movies previously unseen.
6. The Adjustment Bureau
How great is Matt Damon? He appears twice in my Top 10 in two very different types of movies playing very different characters, and you believe him implicitly in both.. The Adjustment Bureau is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, and posits a world where free will is merely an illusion. In reality, every decision of major importance is controlled by a shadow organization, a bunch of guys who look like Mad Men extras. Why do they do it? Who do they work for? The answer is pretty obvious from the start, but rather than getting bogged down in religion, it deals mostly in romance and destiny, presented in fast paced action in the vein of The Fugitive. Damon plays a charismatic upstart politician who meets and instantly falls for a spirited young woman played by Emily Blunt, but somebody with some serious clout doesn't want them to be together. It's as true a love story as you'll find all year, but it works just as well as a crowd pleasing thriller.
5. We Bought a Zoo
The other Matt Damon movie on this list is one that made me feel so good when it was over that I wanted to hug everybody in the theater. Then I went to see it again and wanted to do the same thing. Directed by that perpetual optimist, Cameron Crowe, We Bought a Zoo tells the real life story of Benjamin Mee, a journalist who moves his two children out of the city and into a rundown zoological park, proceeding to rebuild it and their broken family ties in the wake of his wife's death. The idea may sound silly, but one of Crowe's great strengths is taking the potentially corny and making it something genuine.  Damon is excellent yet again, this time as the struggling, heartbroken father just trying to mold a new life for his kids, and the rest of the cast is on point as well, including Scarlett Johansson, Elle Fanning, and Thomas Haden Church.
4. Beats, Rhymes, and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest
Honestly, Michael Rapaport's documentary on what I believe to be the greatest hip hop group ever could have been awful and still appeared in my top 10. I am a die hard, someone who has every single 'Tribe' album, B-side, underground mixtape, and made it a point to see them in concert when they reunited a few years ago. Fortunately, Rapaport is a fanatic as well, and chronicles the rise, fall, and return of the group with enthusiasm. While their story of meteoric heights met by unexplainable internal bickering may seem familiar to fans of similar rock music documentaries, we never get this level of detail for the rap world, and it's interesting because you can sense Rapaport's feelings from behind the camera. The exuberance with which he spotlights their heyday of the early 1990s, to his despair as he sits back and watches his idols beef over what appears to be nothing. The fact that this film wasn't put up as a Best Documentary Academy Award contender is simply criminal.
3. Attack The Block
What do you get when you take the awe and wonder of old school Steven Spielberg fantasy films and mash it up with Walter Hill's The Warriors? You get Attack the Block, a film so wildly inventive it puts other alien invasion flicks to shame. Sorry, Battle: Los Angeles. Directed by Joe Cornish and featuring a mostly fresh faced cast, the genre smashing story centers on a group of South London hooligans who inadvertently start a war when they recklessly kill an alien visitor. Cornish, who also wrote the script, mixes in a healthy(or unhealthy) amount of horror, science fiction, and awesome comic book style action. Yet it never feels excessive, and the focus is always on telling a good story rather than just looking cool. He has some help from Shaun of the Dead vet, Nick Frost, and a star making lead performance from newcomer, John Boyega.
2. Drive
2011 may have been Ryan Gosling's big coming out party as a Hollywood A-lister, but his best role was in his least mainstream film. In 'Drive', he pairs up with Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn in a story that uniquely suits both their tastes, Gosling's penchant for challenging arthouse flicks, and Refn's knack for muscular, yet brainy actioners. Stylish but substantial, Drive is a throwback to old school crime yarns featuring quiet, stoic, charismatic anti-heroes who speak with their fists. Perfectly adapting James Sallis' novel, Refn's film is a study in minimalism, where an overabundance of dialogue gives way to expression and emotion. It's perfect for his terrific ensemble cast, featuring Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, and Albert Brooks at his villainous best. It's a crying shame that so many people ignored Drive, simply because of fears it would be too "artsy" for them. Hollywood could use more intelligent action movies like this.
1. The Descendants
Remember how Alexander Payne forced Jack Nicholson to finally face up to his age in About Schmidt? He does the same to George Clooney in The Descendants, with the celebrity icon(and famous ladies' man) looking more middle-aged than he ever has before. In a tour de force performance, Clooney plays Matt King, a wealthy land owner in a calm Hawaiian paradise, but living the sort of life reserved for soap opera characters. He's just discovered that his wife, who happens to be in a coma she'll never awake from, had been having an affair. Faced with the reality of her loss, he must put aside the contentious jumble of emotions inside him and become the father to his two rebellious daughters they have been missing for so long. Payne has always been a filmmaker that understands that life is never all just one thing. The Descendants is tough, insightful,outrageously funny, and healing. No other film this year can quite say that.